In all countries, including China, the issue is a hot topic. However, the Communist Party (CPC) decided on Friday 13 September to raise the retirement age, which until now is one of the lowest among major economies, despite the accelerated ageing of the population. The reform, which will come into force in 2025, will be extended cautiously over fifteen years. But the retirement age will rise progressively from 60 to 63 for men, from 50 to 55 for women who do manual work and from 55 to 58 for those who work in offices, announced the official agency Nouvelle China on Friday 13 September.
Such a reform was necessary in a country where life expectancy, due to rapid economic development but also to basic health care structures, increased from about 40 years in the 1950s to 71.6 years in 2000 and to more than 78 years today, at the same level as in the United States.
«The previous ages were set in the early 1950s. In seventy years, the country’s economic, social and demographic situation has changed enormously, and the needs of workers have also diversified, making it necessary to adjust the legal exit age»“China has long been concerned about the size of its population,” said Wang Xiaoping, Minister of Human Resources and Social Security, at a press conference on Friday. “Are there too many Chinese?” Experts were still wondering in the title of a Chinese book published in 2012. The huge surplus of labour and the low life expectancy at the time explain why the retirement age was set so low in 1951, two years after the founding of the People’s Republic.
The drastic one-child policy imposed from 1980 onwards had the effect of severely limiting births. Despite its abandonment in 2016, it will not go away again, not least because of the cost of living. The number of births is even continuing to decline and the number of Chinese has decreased, for the second year in a row, in 2023. The proportion of Chinese considered to be of working age (16 to 59 years old) fell from 62% to 61.3% of the population between 2022 and 2023.
There are currently 297 million people over the age of 60, compared with 126 million in 2000. A study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2019 highlighted the risk that pension funds could be exhausted by 2035.
prepare the opinion
The single party had already made this known in July, during its meeting in which it gave the main economic guidelines for the coming years: the third plenary session of 20my Congress of the Central Committee of the CCP: the pension reform was being considered. The official press has prepared the opinion in recent days. “Raising the retirement age is an important reform, necessary due to the ageing of the population and which allows us to make the most of China’s human resources”explained, on Tuesday, September 10, the director of the Chinese Academy of Social Labor Security, Mo Rong, to the Xinhua news agency.
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